I spend my thoughts quite differently now than I used to. I live each day and no longer have the expectation of being able to remember it tomorrow. It will be the same as yesterday after all. It is so contrary to the way I was before, I feel as if I turned a corner as one person and rounding the bend, all unknowing, found myself someone else. Maybe I did, and just don’t remember.
In the same way that I no longer expect to remember details of the day before, I no longer expect to take a step and have my ankle support me, have my leg hold me up, have my hip not seize, and give way. I no longer expect to reach for a cup and keep a grip on it. Many broken mugs.
…I’m sure that meant something once.
I no longer expect to do an hour’s creative work and not have the consequences playing out on my every nerve for that effort. In some way an hours work is now valued more to me than anything before. What will I create with my hour? Will it be worth it? Will the act of creating bring me joy? Will it be remembered? Certainly not by me. I can’t remember yesterday. Pretty sure it was the same as today.
If you had one day, or maybe even just a moment, to understand everything there is, to comprehend the passion of the universe, the tumult that is time and being; the emotions, the thoughts, the feelings in the hearts of those you love, would you want it? What if it came with the full knowingness it would be gone the next instant? Knowing you had once held something so vast and exquisite in your thoughts but unable to find it again in the void of everyday? Would you want to feel it, hold it, for just that one moment, even if you knew you would lose it in the very next instant? Would you want to know the depths of the world, and all the secrets of the universe in between that finite space of just one blink, one breath, and the next? As if your eyes opened and you suddenly understood existence in a new way. In that half second, that moment, fleeting and inescapable, before your lids closed over again, you were able to know all there is? And as your lids fell and that singular breath released, so to, did the curtain drop on the thoughts and the knowing. All that would remain was the knowledge that it was once there. Would you choose it? The seeing? Could you stand the void after? As I lay in the bed under the flat white sheets and stare out the void that is the one window of my room, I ache for the everything that was once in my head. I would take that moment, however brief, just to remember the loves and moments of days past.
I don’t remember being asleep, or falling asleep. Isn’t that strange? Can we really tell, if we fall asleep unknowing, what the difference is between a state unconsciousness and the state of being asleep? Having never really been a good sleeper I’m just not sure I know the difference. You see they’re giving me a lot of drugs now, and I wonder if that is maybe dropping me into this state somewhere between unconsciousness and sleep. A place where I have no recollections, as I surface from the depths, how I got there?
In the past, I can remember getting under the covers, sliding my toes down into the smooth coolness at the end of the bed. Pulling blankets up over my shoulders, feeling the soft sheet lay itself down around my neck. And as my bed embraced me, my toes would begin to warm. I recall nestling my head deep into the pillow, curling into myself and drifting down to settle into dreams both soft and terrifying.
I wake up now, still on my back, no curling up allowed, not having moved, and I’m just there, like I’ve returned into my head from parts unknown. The white sheet is still folded neatly over me, and I really have no recollection of anything at all, the awakeness, the falling, or the dreams. Is that falling asleep if you don’t remember drifting down to it or is it just more missing hours?
It’s true I don’t remember much now; but I can sometimes remember being young. That feeling of being small and vital, explosive with life and feelings. I remember that irrepressible urge to just run down the street as fast as I could in the August sun. That feeling of one foot following the other, quicker, and quicker, and quicker; the percussive slap, slap, slap, of my feet as they propelled me to fly down the street. That vision of the rough pebbles of the sidewalk slipping by beneath me, faster, faster, faster, skipping over the lines between each sidewalk section as I ran. Step on a crack break your mothers back.
….Mother is broken now.
I remember feet, legs, just running, running, running, along the sidewalk with a power all their own. Their energy being pulled up from that infinite seeming well, called Youth.
I remember pumping my small arms in the liquid summer sun, breath, hot and steady, small body going effortlessly forward to destinations unending and unknown. I remember that, as I stare down the vast expense of this hallway, walls adorned with canned art, sanitary in its whiteness. Propped on a despised aluminum frame, pulling in breaths of too little air, and wondering how I will make it to my room at the very end on the left. The place where they put the quiet ones.
Angry and Laughing Through The 2nd Act 